 The first thing we want to talk about is signaling theory. And if you could just explain for us what fitness indicators are in general and why they're so important to understand in the dating scenario. Signaling theory is one of my favorite topics because it's about how do animals, you know, including humans, send signals to each other that are reliable and honest and worth paying attention to. So a fitness indicator would be any signal, any indicator, any cue that says, I'm fit, I'm worth interacting with, I'm worth mating with, you know, in a sexual domain, or I'm worth investing in if you're an offspring trying to show off your fitness to a parent. So it's got all kinds of functions, right, social, sexual, parental, family. You can even signal your fitness to a potential, you know, employer or whatever. So it's a very broad concept. But at the heart of it is the idea that you're sending a signal that would be hard to fake if you weren't as fit as you really are, okay? So it's just like if a weight lifter lifts a heavy weight, you go, oh my gosh, you couldn't have done that if he wasn't really strong. If you're sending a signal of, let's say, particular kind of fitness like intelligence, okay, then you're showing I'm solving problems in a way that I couldn't do if I weren't as smart as I am. Or if you're sending a signal of, let's say, mental health, then you're showing I'm resilient and happy and I can handle stress in a way that I couldn't if I was really neurotic, anxious and worried. In the dating scenario when trying to signal the right things to your mate, what scientifically is shown to make us more attractive in terms of signaling? Obviously we know fitness in the exercise domain, but we've heard a lot about humor and its showcase of intelligence. What are these other signals that we're looking for in partners? Well, the main things I've focused on in my research because I think they're important and interesting and sexy and attractive are intelligence, creativity, art, music, humor, moral virtues like kindness or reliability, and mental health. Those I think are the main things from our brain that are kind of fitness indicators. Then of course there's all the stuff with your body, like are you strong? Can you run fast? Are you flexible? Can you do sports? Stuff like that. I think this is really important because a lot of young men tend to think, well, I wasn't born over six feet and I'm not athletically gifted so I'm out of luck. I see this all the time and as a human being, we've figured out plenty of other ways to demonstrate being a high value to the opposite sex, but those things need to be developed just because they just weren't handed to us. That's okay. There's other ways of going about it. There's other skills that you can develop, humor, certainly being one of them, creativity being one of them. As you were just also mentioning about moral virtues and what's once again, those need to be developed. Though it may seem like a long road, even just showing that you're willing to put attention to those things and work on those things are certainly enough to get other people interested. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the great thing about all these mental fitness indicators like moral virtues or creativity is you can work on them. You can improve them. You can build them. Most guys don't bother. They do a little bit of art and music in high school and then they forget about it or they read a bit during college and they don't read any more serious nonfiction ever. They don't really take care of their mental health with sleep and meditation and exercise and all the stuff that we know helps. You can cultivate these and also, your other point, women will notice that you're trying. Even if you're not there yet, they can see this is a guy making an effort in his life. He's got a plan. He's got ambitions. I think that's hugely attractive because women know damned well that guys under 30 aren't going to be the awesome professional successes that they might naturally swoon over. They can extrapolate, project, here's this guy now. Where is he going to be in five years, 10 years, 20 years? In the mating mind, you talk about these skills as they're not relevant so much anymore to survival. These skills are pretty useless. Being able to play guitar unless you're of Johnny's caliber is probably not going to put food on your table. It's not going to allow you to survive in a classical sense. What we're developing here, these skills are showcasing this dynamic part of personality that attracts us. It's not necessarily the fitness that we all think of. To go along with that, there was a time when I was young and it started to dawn on me that I'm not making it onto the football team. I'm not going to be playing basketball. Athletically, I'm getting my ass kicked by everyone else in this room. There has got to be another way. Luckily for myself, music was close to my heart and my house with my dad being in a band. I saw that as an opportunity to, well, I need to put all of my eggs in that basket. The other thing that was popular at the time, it was in the late 80s, early 90s, skateboarding was coming into its own as a sport in and of itself that was gathering attention. For me, it was those two things. To be recognized and either one of those was going to give me a shot. I threw everything I had at both of them in order to get that attention. That sexual selection pressure allowed you to pick up a guitar and pick up a skateboard. It seems fascinating to me that all of these skills that we're talking about here have shaped our brain through this idea of sexual selection. The brain is pretty wasteful. Yeah, it's a big wasteful ornament and that's been a big theme in my whole research program. I think a mistake that a lot of guys make is imagining that, okay, because there's this set of professional musicians, rock stars who attract a lot of groupies, I have to be as good as a rock star at keyboards or guitar or DJing or whatever in order to attract women. No, you don't. You just have to be impressive enough. You just have to develop the skills well enough to be more worth listening to than not. Guys can't hold themselves up to a professional standard because you don't have to make a living doing these things. They just have to be sexually and socially attractive. To go along with that, look what it's conveying, what it's showing, that I'm willing to put in the time and the effort and intelligent enough to figure this thing out to a certain level that's certainly going to transition into other areas of your life and that that dedication and focus is going to certainly convey itself and be seen in other places. Yeah, if you've got the ambition and dedication and self-control and willpower to spend even just a thousand hours learning some skill like drawing a woman's portrait or playing piano or doing a little bit of improv comedy, whatever it is, that reveals an enormous amount about your character and your self-control and that women know that will translate into other domains like your work and your family life. What's fascinating is this is not what we classically think of when we think of impressing a mate. A lot of us through marketing and the way that it's perceived in media, it's flashy. It's the fancy car, the nice watch, accumulation of goods. What we're talking about here is developing skills. This is not what we normally think of when we're trying to impress a mate. How have these pressures culturally and in society, especially through marketing now, change the way we view sexual selection? Well, of course, advertisers want to convince you that you can't succeed in the sexual marketplace without buying the products. And they do a very good job of instilling, making you sexually anxious and then saying, and here is the solution, buy this good, buy this service, and then you'll be good. The watch, the car, the clothes, whatever. But women see through that pretty well. And a lot of guys spend a vast amount of time and energy chasing money to try to buy this stuff to attract a mate when they could just be taking that same time and developing actual skills that could last a lifetime to attract a mate. So you have to figure out what is your real goal? Is it to consume or is it to mate? To go along with that, there was the young man from Santa Barbara. Elliot Rogers, right? And when you looked at his social media and things like that, he had the BMW. He had the designer glasses. He had all the name brand clothes. And he was he desperately was trying to signal to all these women. But once again, that that chasing and that signaling had let him down. And which to the detriment of of the society around him, he took it out on on those people. Yeah, that's a really sad and tragic example of taking the consumerist game like way too seriously and then failing to cultivate you know, the other skills and traits that could have really helped. Like if he had just worked a bit on like, how do I not be creepy? That could have gone a long way and it could have saved, you know, some some lives. So when we think about it, classically, we think about the Peacock has its tails, birds have their songs. We've seen Planet Earth with those fancy dances. And obviously, we now know that consumerism is not the way to get there. What in your mind is the better trait to display as we're working on improving ourselves? What I've noticed with my undergrads lately is that they've really been failed by K through 12 public education in that they really don't know a lot about the world. They really don't know basics of like geography and history and culture and ideas and philosophy and science and so forth. So it's not that you have to become kind of a walking wikipedia to succeed on a first date, but you should have some idea what's going on around you in the world and society and culture. And a lot of guys don't spend enough time doing that, you know, thinking, hey, maybe I should like subscribe to the economist and like read it for an hour a week, in which case you'll know more than 95 percent of guys. About the state of the world. So I think general knowledge is a great way to show off intelligence and learning and just engagement with the world. I think. I'm not a great dancer, but actually being able to dance is really valuable. A lot of women love to go dancing and love men to take them dancing. And a lot of guys suck at it and never even try. And they should do like a little Napoleon dynamite and like practice in their room for a bit and at least get decent at that. And that'll go a long way. You were mentioning to learn the dance. It's to be willing to dance to be willing to put yourself out there and allow the music to move you in a way that allows to let you feel good. That's certainly enough to get the girls giggling and want to be out there with you. Exactly. And that's, you know, it's funny. You should mention dancing because one of the things we do on our boot camps here in LA is on Friday night, we take our clients out and on the guy group programs. They dance for them, dance in what we call a diamond. And it's not about actually having rhythm and it's not about being this tremendous dancer to your point earlier about being the professional. But it's the unabashed, not carrying how you are perceived and allowing yourself to have fun in the moment that women pick up on and are drawn to and sometimes the most awkward, weird dances that you would think, oh, these are no way would that attract someone to dance to dance with them. Actually draw in people because it allows everyone else to let loose a little bit and not take themselves so seriously. Yeah. And dance is a funny thing because women basically read your attitude as a dancer is being kind of a proxy for how you'll be in bed. Right. So can you can you be in your body and have fun with your body? Like you don't necessarily need perfect rhythm or a lot of different moves or like doing your shuffle dancing or break dancing or tutting or whatever you're doing. But you just need to be comfortable as a person and not take yourself too seriously. Have a sense of humor about it because sex is kind of ridiculous and there are funny moments in sex. So if you can be the guy who's willing to kind of get out of your head and into your body and women can see that, then they'll kind of read that as, oh, he'd be fun in bed. And we've been probably dancing for at least $100,000 years as a species. So it's a pretty primal thing. Yeah. And that's exactly it. If you look across cultures, completely different cultures, they're all dancing and moving to music. Well, I don't know. Where do we get this notion that we can override four million years of baked-in evolution that's in our DNA and we're all of a sudden now we can override it? No, we can't. Now, earlier this month, we talked about this third dating market that's emerging online and it seems like more and more people are gravitating to it. One, just because of its ease, you're on your phone all day. Why not join an app and see what's out there? How can we take these same things that we're developing in our in-person dating life and showcase them online to be more effective? Well, I think the number one thing whatever dating app you're using is just give some information, put some effort into actually having a profile that somebody would enjoy reading and it says something about you. Like, I'm astonished at the number of people on Tinder who don't even include a single word, just some photos and bad photos. And how is someone supposed to evaluate you based on almost zero information? I've used match.com. I've used Tinder. I've used OKCupid. I actually prefer OKCupid because they've got these hundreds and hundreds of questions you can answer and then you can get your match percentage. How closely matched are we? To me, that gives a huge boost in terms of the likelihood of a first date succeeding. Both in terms of the questions and also you can write pretty long profiles. So you should mention this stuff about yourself that it's not like you should do a list of all your fitness indicators. You have to make it fun, engaging, story-driven, visual, etc. But you should do a profile and then show it to some actual women, like female friends, and go, what are the strengths and weaknesses here? Do a little test marketing because it's very hard for a lot of guys to anticipate how will a woman read this? Is it too narcissistic? Is it too self-effacing? Whatever. There's something you said there that I think is a magic word when it comes to these dating apps and you said the test market. These pictures and it's marketing material. And so these pictures do need to be done well. And I know from personal experience that when I first got onto those apps myself, I had this idea of, well, I don't want those pictures to look like I'm trying hard and I need it to be relaxed. And I talked myself into having them be really planned. And of course my response that I had gotten from those was also bland. Was also bland. Then we had taken some pictures for our website and for other for social media. And I used those pictures that were professionally done on my, and of course my hit rate went through the roof. And those pictures are not only telling a story, there's a lot of what they're not saying as well, but there was care put in them. They said a lot about my personality and they were able, for other people, for the women to feel good then about connecting with me. Women tend to read like the effort that you put into the profile is going to reflect on the effort that you might put into a date or a relationship. So if you're just a lazy slacker and you're not really making the effort on profile, why would they expect you to be capable of making the effort to have interesting conversation on the date? To go along with that, I know for the other guys out there who are thinking about it or have done it, they've had a hard time in those corrections. And I mentioned like don't feel weird about spending a hundred bucks on a professional photographer to come over and do some natural shots or have a friend who is interested in photography and you guys go out. Right, with a good camera, not blurry, not middle of the night while you're out partying. And you'll be surprised with that, what that does for you. Well, there's a few things that you mentioned that I really want to key in on and number one is you want the photos to tell the story as well, right? You have only so many words and the photos are in large part how they're going to picture you in person and also think about how they would feel next to you in those photos. So a lot of us, when we're picking photos, we're picking photos with groups of people, it's tough to see who's who's us versus our friends. Oh, is that girl our sister or our girlfriend? We don't know. We're sending all these mixed signals. The photos should clearly show you in an environment that you're having fun that would allow that person who's viewing the profile to see themselves and vision themselves hanging out with you and having a good time. Number one, the second thing you talked about was take a position on something, stand out for something. And a lot of our clients will have strong disqualifiers in their profile. Don't message me if you eat pizza with pineapple and they get messages from women who want to debate them and love pineapple on their pizza. Why? Because they took a stand. They said something. They said, hey, I have and it might be silly, but they said, don't message me. And that disqualifier shows the other person of like, oh, OK, I actually want to be interested in this person. Instead of the generic cast the widest net, try to get everyone to like me. Oh, I like any type of pizza. You could put anything on your pizza and I'll eat it. That doesn't work online. Yeah, it's OK to say what you love, but you don't have to say I require a woman to love or hate the same thing. So you need to have strong decisive opinions. I mean, I would advise like unless you have an extremely strong passion for politics to kind of steer away from that in a profile, because a lot of guys on average tend to be more conservative than women. We know that from political psychology. So if you highlight politics, a lot of women will kind of have a very negative reaction to you bragging about like how many guns you own or whatever. And also religion is tricky. So, you know, unless you're definitely like a Mormon and you want to meet a nice Mormon woman, then just try to cast a wide net. But you can say what your beliefs are kind of at a more abstract level. Like what do you care about ethically? You know, you can say I'm really committed to whatever this environmental cause or for animal welfare or stuff like that. And then women will go, oh, he cares about something other than himself. That's that's virtue signaling, but it's a good kind of virtue signaling. And in the moment, a lot of times what we think logically would turn us on or get us excited are not actually the things that turn us on and get us excited. Yeah, you can't you can't figure this stuff out from first principles, right? It's just like marketing. An ad agency cannot just create an ad campaign and then be confident. Like, well, it ticks these six boxes, so it's bound to work. No, they have they have to test it. They have to do focus groups. They have to like air it in a particular market. And if it works there, then go nationwide. And it's the same with dating tactics that, you know, you can read evolutionary psychology and you can develop pretty deep insights into how all this stuff works. But when it comes down to specifics, you just kind of have to try stuff. Either asking your female friends, what do you think with this work? Or just try it out on dates. And as long as you have a playful attitude about it, there's not much of a downside. Yeah, when when consent is in play, it's respectful. Testing these things out, trying these things out are an opportunity for you to grow. Yeah, you've got to do stuff that most women would understand is challenging, right? So things like doing combat sports and kind of bouncing back from from your setback and like, oh man, I was rolling in the jujitsu class and I got arm barred and, you know, my elbow is all fucked up and but it's OK. I'll get it right. Or even serving in the military is a huge resilience indicator to a lot of women. And it's not that they're obsessed with like soldiers and guns. It's that they know, oh, military training is hard, deployments are hard. And he made it through. Or even doing stuff that's potentially socially embarrassing, public speaking, improv comedy, even live musical performance. If you're very neurotic and you have stage fright, you won't be able to do that stuff very well. So a lot of these things that are kind of indicators of high value are partly indicators of mental health and resilience. And you can imagine that would be very attractive in a mate, right? Neuroticism, worries, anxiety, catastrophizing is not what we're looking for when we're trying to have fun on that date, when we're trying to get to know someone. We talk a lot about happiness and the pursuit of happiness and how this trap can happen where we're just on this spinning wheel towards happiness. Obviously outward expression of happiness, being able to show that you have a healthy mindset is important. But the singular pursuit of happiness is where we kind of get off track. Humor, big one we talk about. Obviously, whether it's getting on stage and doing a stand up or just being able to roll with the punches of life and have some fun at your own expense, even self deprecating at times showcases that intelligence that we're talking about. And improv, I mean, what a wonderful thing. And we love it so much that it's incorporated in our classes. But it allows you to laugh at yourself. It allows you to practice being witty. It allows you to practice rolling with the punches, as you said, and self expression. And listening. And listening. You have to be an adept listener. Openness is another one, right? That I'll give it a try mindset. Yeah. So the way emotional stability versus neuroticism is one of the so-called big five personality traits, openness to experience is a second of the big five personality traits. And it correlates a little bit with political attitudes. It's like people on the left tend to be a little more open than people on the right. But you can express openness in so many ways, like doing the foreign travel, sampling different cuisines, reading a wide range of books, listening to a lot of different genres of music, dating a variety of people from different professions and backgrounds and so forth. And I think for many women, openness is attractive because they know, okay, this guy's not going to end up being a kind of stick in the mud, boring husband by age 35. He's going to keep his edge and try new things. I think a lot of married women are terrified. I'm going to be stuck with the same guy forever. And I love him, but I'd kind of like him to grow with me and be willing to try new things. And if you can demonstrate kind of a reasonable degree of openness in the first few dates, it's very reassuring to women that they're not going to be trapped with the same stale personality forever. Now, let's talk to that guy or girl who is struggling in these areas, in these traits. And we've talked a lot about obviously the influence of media steering us off course. What advice can we give someone who's identified, okay, I need to improve these traits, how can we do that? There's so much information out there, right? And it's so easy to access, but a lot of it's wrong. This is one of my professional gripes as a psychology professor, is literally about 70 or 80% of the psychology that's presented to the public through magazines and news media is wrong and literally wrong and we know it's wrong and we've known it's wrong for 20 or 30 years. So it's really hard to find the good information. I think what you need to do is figure out what specific thing do I want to work on? You can't just go, my life's a mess. I need to get my shit together. I need to level up in some generic way. No, you need to do something specific, like ask women you know, what is my weak spot? What is the one thing that I need to fix before anything else? You probably don't know what that weak spot is, so you need some radically honest friends to tell you. And then you'll be depressed, you'll be sad, you'll need to sit with that for a minute and then figure out, okay, what do I do about that? Maybe you dress terribly and you have no understanding of clothing and people point that out to you, like your shoes suck and nothing you wear fits. Then okay, you need to learn about that and you need to go on YouTube and watch some videos about it and read the right books and take advice or maybe somebody says your sense of humor sucks and you make too many puns and you don't tell enough funny stories and then you need to do things like watch some stand-up comedy and pay really close attention to how long does a joke take? How is the pacing? How is the delivery? When does the comedian pause? When do they speed up? And then just practice that stuff on your friends. You don't even need to restrict it to sort of dating practice. Now you also discuss intelligence markers. We've talked a little bit, danced around it a little bit here. Humor being a big one of them, but what are some other intelligence markers that come into play here? Well, there's the sort of consumerist intelligence indicators which are called college degrees, right? This is one of the most expensive consumer goods you can possibly buy is formal higher education. Some women will go, oh, he's got a college degree, he's probably smart. Well, guess what? Most young men get college degrees now and even graduate degrees. That's great, but it's a very, very expensive way to indicate your intelligence in both time and money. The more natural ways we display intelligence are honestly just through talking, conversation, being a good conversation partner who can tell interesting stories, who's got some interesting views about the world, who can be funny, who's a good listener, who's socially astute in interacting with women. And there's a lot of different components to intelligence. Most women are not going to fall in love with a guy who's just a great chess player. Some will, but that's not a natural way that men displayed intelligence 50,000 years ago. The way our ancestors displayed intelligence was being socially savvy, being good at hunting, being good at forming alliances with other guys, having technical skills like making weapons and tools, and just being generally competent at learning stuff. So it doesn't matter that much what you become competent at. As long as women can see, oh, he's good at this and this and this and this. Therefore, his brain probably works pretty well and he's smart, smart enough for me. Now, whenever we discuss dating on the show here, we get inundated with messages around the nice guy and nice guy syndrome. It's been coined a lot of things. And we all know the classic story of the bad boy who comes in and it has all the sexual choice in the world. So he gets all the mates. And we've also heard of the dreaded friend zone and being the nice guy who finishes last. You came up with the concept of the tender defender. And I think it's fantastic. I'd love for you to explain to our audience what you mean by that. And then we can discuss how we can become tender defenders. Yeah. The tender defender is the idea that women want a kind of mosaic of traits that a guy can kind of deploy in different situations. So if she is with him and they have kids and there is a serious physical threat or even a social threat, reputational threat to their family, he has to be able to step up and be the defender, protect her using any means necessary, right? Machiavellian intelligence, if it's a social threat or physical force, if it's a physical threat. On the other hand, most of the time, she'll want him to be tender, caring, compassionate, a good dad, a good partner, attentive in bed, etc. So guys have to figure out how do you display both sides of this? How do you show a woman you're capable of going into defender mode, protective mode, and stepping up when there's a threat? But also, most of the time you can be kind, normal, not really nice guy, but warm, warm-hearted. And getting that balance right is very tricky, particularly for young men. They either kind of overdo the tough, protective image, the bad boy who won't actually defend you when the shit hits the fan, right? Because he's bad. He's not ethical. He's not capable of real commitment. But you also don't want to be the nice guy who can't ever stand up for himself or argue with the woman or say no to her or say no to anybody else. So do you have an ideal breakdown or ratio to tender to defender? Well, what we said in the Mate book is that you should be in this sort of tender, warm-hearted mode, like about 95% of the time under most circumstances in kind of civilized society, and kind of in defender mode, a small percentage of the time. But that small percent is really crucial and women pay a lot of attention to it. It's about expressing assertiveness not constantly, not over the top, but expressing assertiveness in front of her on a date that demonstrates that there is this defender side to you. And being someone who's virtuous, caring, compassion, all these things that we've talked about is important 95% of the time. But being able to step into that moment of tension, that moment of, uh-oh, what are we going to do? That 5% of the time matters tremendously to avoid the friend zone, to avoid the nice guy syndrome. And of course, those are the moments that get elevated in this bad boy mindset, right? He comes in and saves the day. But it's the other 95% of the time where he doesn't give a shit about anyone. He's being selfish, taking whatever he wants, using people that doesn't actually work. Yeah. And I think the defender mode, it really helps a lot to have done some combat sports, like your mixed martial arts, Hujutsu, stuff like that. Not that you'll ever necessarily use it, but guys carry themselves differently if they've had that training than if they haven't. And women notice that. So I think that's one way of sort of displaying defender potential. And then I think being socially assertive is the other thing. Are you willing to speak up in groups? Are you willing to stand up to authority if the authority is threatening a woman, right? Are you willing to take risks for her? She'll pay an enormous amount of attention to all of that. But for introverts like me, it's tough to learn that kind of social assertiveness. It's kind of taken like decades and I've had many, many errors and missteps before I really understood how it worked. There's also, as you say, there's also sexual assertiveness as well. Yeah. Oh, the third thing absolutely is kind of your potential for sexual domination to the right degree under the right circumstances if you're doing the right kind of sexual role play. When I teach about BDSM and kink in my human sexuality class, a lot of the students' minds are kind of blown about, wait, you can leave your egalitarian feminism at the door when you go in the bedroom and you can do stuff that's that's a power exchange dynamic where somebody takes the lead and the other person follows and and then they go, of course that's hot. I mean, that's every female romance novel has that power dynamic. And a lot of women and men fantasize about that, but they're too frightened to really play around with it. Once you do, though, I think it's enormously helpful because you can kind of like modulate how much of it you you bring into your sex lives all the way from just I'll pull your hair a little bit to I will tie you up in a complex shabari, bondage suspension or whatever, right? So yeah, combat sports, social assertiveness, BDSM, three key ingredients. Sounds like a very fun semester at the University of New Mexico. Now, obviously, we're all thinking, how can we do this authentically, right? A lot of what we talked about could be outside of your reality, right? We're blowing your mind here. Oh my god, I have to work on all these things. And I think this authenticity paradigm comes into play here where it's like, I don't want to do this just for other people to like me, right? I don't want you to listen to the show and go, OK, I got to run out and do all these things just to get other people to like me. How can we do it authentically? Because if it's inauthentic, it's not going to work. I think this is a really tough issue for a lot of people to get their heads around. And the way I like to think about it is the self that you want to be authentic to is your future best self, 10 or 20 years down the road. Being authentic to your current mediocre, half-baked self is actually not, doesn't make any sense, right? It's very comfortable. But that's not a very deep form of authenticity. Your real authenticity should be to your genetic potential, your mate value potential, your social and career potential and all of that. If you actualize that, then you're being authentic to your real highest self. And the views of other people, the views of potential mates and friends and your family, these are all just hints about what direction to go to get to that authentic point. We're just coming out of Mother's Day about to celebrate Father's Day in terms of raising a child in this environment. And you work a lot with college students. What advice would you have for a parent who wants to set their child up for success in the dating realm to give them a leg up and give them the opportunity that they need to develop out these traits that we highlighted today? Yeah. Well, of course, the most important thing you can do if you want to have kids is choose a good mate so the kids will get good genes. But if you're already past that point, you've already chosen your mate, then I think it's really important to let the kids take risks and take some hard knocks and learn resilience. There's great books out now like Greg Lukinoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. Brian Kaplan has a great book called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids that basically says trust your kids genes. They'll probably do okay. If you and your mate are okay, your kids will do okay. You don't need to try to push them all the time towards excellence in some perfectionistic way. You can just let them be kids and they'll probably grow up all right. There was a book that was a bit controversial that I wanted to check out. I think it was called Free Range Parenting, which is another good one. Yeah. I'd recommend that and try to make your kids' lived experience as similar as possible to, I don't know, the way I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio was we would go out on a Saturday morning and play in the neighborhood and have adventures in the woods and our parents would have no idea what we were up to. Hopefully, we'd come home for dinner. If we were late, maybe we'd have a neighbor call, like, oh, they're still okay. They're just eating over here. But there was no monitoring. There was no parents checking in, chauffeuring us around. We were as autonomous as possible. It's not that the world is objectively riskier than it was then. People just think it's riskier. Kids are very, very sensitive to the parent's reactions to situations. If a kid falls down and skins their knee and the parent is like, oh, my God, this is terrible. I should have been monitoring you more closely. The kid will think, oh, gosh, this is a big deal, the skin knee. If the parent's like, yeah, if that happens, every kid gets that, you'll recover. It'll hurt for a few days. It creates a completely different response in the kid, and it reframes how they think about the experience. To go along with that, I remember falling out of a tree, playing in the woods with the neighbor kids. I punctured my alarm. I still have the scarf from it today. And seeing it, and at this point, I've already been to the hospital multiple times for stitches. I think I was at 12 at this point. I remember going home and I was like, Dad, we've got to go to the hospital. I fell out of a tree. He looked at me and was like, yeah, let's get the car. It wasn't a big deal at that point anymore because it was just a normal occurrence with me going out in the woods to play. Yeah. And I think the same thing also holds in response to emotional setbacks. So if you've got a teenage kid and they have a crush on someone and they get spurned and rejected, and they're kind of sad, if your response is, oh, you poor thing, that's really, really hard versus the mating market's tough, and you will have heartbreaks now and in the future. And you will get over it in about a week or two. And I've had that. Your dad's had that, whatever. It also reframes mating setbacks as not catastrophes. But I worry that a lot of American parents are sort of so guilty about going to work and not being around as much for their kids as maybe their parents were, that then they overdue the coddling and the emotion signaling, mostly out of guilt. Right? And I think that's a terrible way to raise a kid. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time. A lot of great advice out there for dating both men and women can take a lot from this understanding what goes into attraction and actually making us a compelling mate to someone else and having a great first date. We really appreciate it. I'm sorry, sir. Thank you, gentlemen. Thanks, guys.